Category Archives: Thanksgiving

The Problem with Thanksgiving

Things happen at Thanksgiving, right? It’s like we can’t have a holiday celebrating all we should be thankful for without the universe conspiring to make us just a little bitchy about it. And maybe because of all we juggle around the holidays, it’s harder for women. Beer, a football game, and some sort of roasted dead animal on the table are all many guys need to be thankful.

Women are more susceptible. We have that thing in our heads. And no matter what kind of Thanksgiving celebration we’ve decided to participate in, no matter how modern, how streamlined, pared down, green, community-minded, or spiritual we want it to be we have these expectations of ourselves and every single person who crosses our path. That’s when the universe messes with us.

I have hosted Thanksgiving dinner at our house for the past 30 years, and I have plenty examples of being profoundly and aggressively ungrateful. My personal worst best was the year the electricity went out at ten in the morning, one hour after I had put the turkey in the oven. That year my husband was away at work, and I had twenty some people arriving in hours. I managed to pull off an entire dinner on one of those round charcoal Weber grills (while it was snowing) and we all squeezed into the living room in front of the fire to eat in our coats. The silver lining (it’s mandatory to find a silver lining on Thanksgiving) was that it was cold enough to leave the leftovers out and not bother with cleaning up until the next day, but of course the electricity went back on the instant we had finished eating.

Over the years, I have gotten pretty good at pulling off a feast for two dozen people. Most of the things that would have sent me into a panic in the past I can now anticipate or adapt to. So I keep upping the ante. I want our Thanksgiving to be better each year. More thankful. Less gluttonous. This year I wanted Thanksgiving to be more integrated, less clannish. I wanted us to talk to people we don’t see often. I wanted us to come away from our time this year knowing a few more people on a deeper level.

Because we have so many people, seating is always a challenge. We’ve done the long banquet table thing, but people sit next to the same people year after year having the same conversations year after year. I wanted to orchestrate the interaction a little more this time. I thought about dividing our group into two or three smaller numbers and then having us rearrange ourselves in between courses. A Round Robin Thanksgiving. I spent weeks perusing menus that could be divided into discrete courses so as to facilitate a natural break for switching tables. Soup and salad, followed by meat and potatoes, followed by dessert? I spent days scribbling potential table groupings and regroupings. I sweated the numbers and various combinations as my guest list swelled and shrank and swelled and shrank. I considered sounding a bell to initiate a switch, mid-meal, take your plate and glass and run to the next station. A Chinese Fire Drill Thanksgiving. Thursday morning, as I penned yet another configuration of people and tables one of my sons looked over my shoulder said, “It’s Thanksgiving, not speed dating.”

Hmm. Point well made. Sanity returned.

This year a predictable number of things threw a wobble into my carefully spun event. At the last minute four people were added to the mix. (Thank goodness I’d abandoned the designated seating!) Running out of gas was the theme of the day– first my rotisserie grill at some undetermined point during the five hour roasting period, and later the car of the daughter bringing the vegetables. For the first hour and a half the two year old screamed any time someone spoke to or looked at him. Like every year, we scrambled a little, improvised some, and carried on.

There was a moment, after the food was on display, the candles lit, multiple tables set and optional casual seating provided, that I paused to enjoy the scene. But it was later, half way through the evening as my husband and I sat quietly together and shared a smile that I felt the full force of gratitude for this day. At that point plates and napkins, beer bottles and half full wine glasses littered every surface. The floor was an obstacle course of matchbox cars and legos. The guitars were out, the singing was boisterous. The five year old, wearing feathered headdress and loin cloth, hopped and whooped and beat the drums to his rain dance while the two year old lay peacefully on the floor feeding handfuls of pie to the dog. My Martha Stewart Thanksgiving had turned into Animal House. And I loved it, all the more so because of the stuff that could have ruined it for me, but didn’t.

This, I think, is the problem with Thanksgiving. It’s not the work ahead of time, or the clean-up after, and it’s certainly not that things happen. The problem with Thanksgiving is that it is only one day. On this one day the bad stuff actually reminds me to be thankful. On this one day I look for, and (surprise, surprise!) find the silver lining. On this one day I am mindfully grateful. On this one day.

Letter to Hannah

Four days until Thanksgiving and my niece is at Johns Hopkins Hospital after overdosing on her mother’s prescription medicine Saturday night. We got the news yesterday morning that she’s been cutting herself, the full length of both her arms covered in slices. I don’t feel very thankful today, and it seems a horror to me for the rest of the family to gather at my home on Thursday to “celebrate” while Hannah sits in the psych ward, broken at the age of fourteen.

I am full of so many emotions that are crying out for expression.

Rage. Where are the grown-ups in this child’s life? I am one of them. Guilt. For over ten years my husband and I have watched this sweet child’s life unfold like a slow motion train wreck. Why didn’t we do more to flag down help, to stand in the tracks of her lonely and dysfunctional life and say STOP THIS TRAIN RIGHT NOW! Incredible sadness. I am so easily satisfied by the joys in my own small world, and so easily ignore the injury and brokenness even in my own extended family. And how dare I? Because I am that child, I was that broken. I had a different train wreck of a childhood, more of a Running with Scissors scenario than a slow motion pile up, but I remember like yesterday the feeling of needing to hold the universe together since the grown-ups in my world were so clearly bent on pulling it all down on top of us.

Hannah, the world has failed you. I wish I could fix it, fix you, but I could not even fix myself and my own world. You might look at me and Uncle Bruce, at our family, and think we have everything. We have so very much, and so much that we’ve tried to share with you and with your mom, with your dad when he was a part of your life. But now I see that none of that, not our love, not our concerns, not our interventions, were ever going to make life right for you.

When I was a little girl I used to pray – to God, to Jesus, to whoever might be listening and responsible for the disaster that was my family. When I became a teenager, I decided that because nothing had changed and things had even gotten worse that God did not exist. In college, I thought that getting away from my family would make things better, and they were for a while. After a couple of years though, I was messing up my own life pretty efficiently and realized that the “crazy” was in me, not just all around me. I had given up on God many years before, but it turns out He/She had been listening all those years. I just didn’t hear back from Him until I was twenty-one. At twenty-one, sitting in a jail cell in Washington D.C., the Creator of the universe reached out to me, and I was just desperate enough to reach back. I can’t explain very well how I knew it was God, but I did.

I wish I could say I held onto God’s hand for dear life and never let go, but I didn’t. I’m just not that smart. I did even more terrible stuff and sank into even deeper despairs, but the incredible, powerful Love that reached out to me that day in jail never shrank back, never left. You will hear people ask why God lets terrible things happen, and I can’t answer for the things that happen to other people, but I know for certain that I would never have reached out and found the hand of God if all the bad things had not happened to me. Maybe life would be just fine if everybody behaved themselves and never hurt themselves or other people, but we seem to be inclined toward selfishness and self destruction as a rule. Hannah, you are only fourteen and the weight of keeping the world safe has already worn you down. I don’t know what lies in store for you today or tomorrow, but I know the power of Love and I know the name of Love. Cry out Hannah. Cry out for Love to reach you, and I will cry with you.

Finally I will be thankful, Hannah. I will be thankful for Love- not the love I have for you or you have for your mother, because our love fails. Our love hurts. I will be thankful for the Love that imagined you and had the power to create you, the Love that found me at twenty-one, the Love that can and does hold the universe together. I will be thankful for your future in that Love, and I will wait in faith and prayer for Love to rescue you.